Cam Modeling and “Future Sex”
Cam Modeling and “Future Sex”
Emily Witt’s (2016) publication Future Sex chronicles her search for sexual self-realization as a New Yorker in her early 30s migrating to tech-centered SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA. The book is situated both in interviews and personal encounters, stringing vignettes together into chapters with topics including polyamory, Orgasmic Meditation, Internet porn, and Burning up Man. In this particular review, I highlight her section on sex camming.
But first, I’ll start with a wide overview. A major theme in the publication is the type of existential angst that originates from having too many choices. Witt seems daunted by her sexual freedom as a millennial—the unlimited range of intimate partners and procedures—first made possible by the sexual trend, and then by the web. She (p. 12) points out:
Imagine if love failed us? Sexual freedom experienced now extended to people who never wished to shake off the old establishments, except to the extent of displaying solidarity with friends who do. I hadn’t sought so much choice for myself, and when I came across myself with total intimate freedom, I used to be unhappy.
Witt spent her early adult life wanting to find enduring love—and perhaps even relationship—looking at this as a getaway from the cycle of causal intimate arrangements, occasionally punctuated by intervals of monogamy, that has up until now defined her intimate life. But Witt’s desires issue with the world she inhabits, as Millennial sexual norms privilege freedom over security in human relationships. She (pp.11-2) details why security remains attractive, even as the web opens ever more possibilities:
The extension of sexuality beyond marriage acquired brought new reasons to trust the original settings, reasons such as HIV, enough time limitations of fertility, the delicacy of emotions. Even as I resolved for freedom as an interim condition, I prepared for my monogamous future. My sense of rightness, following the failed tests of previous generations, was like the reconstructions of the baroque national monument that was destroyed with a bomb but another kind of freedom had came: a blinking cursor in empty space.
In questioning these new passionate configurations where freedom prevails, Witt echos what social theorists Anthony Giddens and the past due Zygmunt Bauman respectively describe as “pure relationships” and “liquid love.” Both authors claim that the ideal of unconditional dedication has been supplanted by continuous negotiation and the criterion of shared advantage. And, even in coupling, personality remains central.
Missing a secure, dedicated relationship in the old mold, Witt sets out to explore the possibility of fulfillment (or, at least, self-knowledge) in less standard situations. As works out, it is within the chapter on “Live Webcams” that Witt will the most theoretical work to describe why seeking diverse experiences—the task of the reserve—might aid in her search for sexual self-realization. Specifically, she points to an essay in the reserve Time Square Red, Times Square Blue by the gay African-American writer Samuel D. Delany about the time he spent having anonymous sex in porno theaters. Witt (p. http://blablacams.com/profile/isabelhills 126) summarizes the article:
Delany explaind the advantages of his vast experience in casual sex. The concert halls had served as laboratories in which he had discovered to discern the nuances and spectrum of his intimate desire… His observations about intimate attraction consistently disproved regular notions of beauty and ugliness. (He discovered, among other proclivities, that he had a thing for Burly Irish-American men, including two who acquired hairlips.)
She estimates Delany who suggests we must “learn to find our very own way of experiencing sex sexy” and concludes:
I don’t see how this is accomplished without a statistically significant variety of partners… However supportive, the response of an individual partner just cannot do that. This is a quintessentially social process…
Unlike Delany, Witt (p. 204) mainly lands back where she started, finding monogamy rewarding however now embracing a perfect of dedication as short-term:
I hope that married relationship would stop to be observed as a totalizing end point and instead become something more humble, perhaps am institutional basis for shared endeavors such as increasing children or making artwork.
But this go back to a somewhat standard notion of romance shows to be the most interesting facet of the book. Witt’s thinking about the freedom and diversity of experience open to the present era seems to develop. Rather than seeing the nearly infinite range of sexual options as daunting, Witt eventually ends up seeing it as an opportunity to experiment until one discovers confidence and feels affirmed in their own desires. She (p. 204) says:
I found that… mostly I needed to live in a world with a wider range of sexual identities. I hoped the primacy and legitimacy of an individual intimate model would continue to erode as it has, with increasing acceleration, before fifty years.
Though she will not condition it so explicitly, I’d argue that Witt has uncovered an interesting dialectic between freedom and security. Though freedom to explore may aid us in finding what we should find sexually desirable, exploration may, paradoxically, lead to security in one’s set up sexual wishes, when new experience constantly prove less satisfying and thus reaffirm the appropriateness of those desires.
And, while final chapter amazing things off a little, I think the desirability of embracing this stress between freedom and security is the clear (if unstated) summary of the publication.
Following this theme of sexual exploration as a system of self-realization, I now want to turn to the question of what camming teaches Witt about her own sexuality (and what we should can learn about camming along the way). Witt (p. 114) describes her encounters with the favorite camsite Chaturbate:
I first saw Chaturbate and the many other live-sex-cam sites available online as porn… as the technological progression of peep show booths and telephone sex lines. Like those, that they had a performer plus they got a voyeur… Then I spent additional time on the website.
As she dives deeper into the site, Witt decides that the resemblances she noticed between cam sites and other kinds of sex work/performance were only superficial. The variety and interactivity of cam sites arranged them aside.
Chaturbate was full of serendipity… the feeling of clicking through the 18+ disclaimer in to the opening matrix was the main one of turning on MTV in the mid-1990s, when music videos performed most of the day and kept audiences captive in the expectation of a favorite performer or a new discovery. Or maybe, to reach farther back in time, it recalled the earlier times of the Internet—the Internet of strangers rather than “friends.”
Witt’s decision to approach her subject material through the zoom lens of her own desire—as defined in the first portion of this review—demonstrates both interesting and difficult in this section.
What makes Witt’s strategy interesting is that, in bypassing the popular rooms that she largely discovers uninteresting, she requires us to the margins of the websites, looking for the unforeseen. This includes an Icelandic woman who strips wearing a rubber horse cover up and fedora. In a passage representative of her snarky but appreciative style, Witt explains (pp. 112-3):
maybe it was the home that she is at or her hi-def camera or a general feature of the Icelandic people but even faceless she gleamed with the well-being that emanates wherever per-capita usage of seafood oils is high and residents reap the benefits of socialized healthcare.
Witt also identifies a college-age women who talked about literature and made $1,500 doing a 24 hour marathon that featured much talking, some nudity, no sex. A 3rd girl suspended herself from a hook made of ice. And another woman kept nude sex ed discussions.
Taking a cue from one of her interviewees, Witt details the designed use of site—one or two performers broadcasting to many viewers in each room—as “mass intimacy.” But, the most interesting part of the chapter was Witt’s exploration into a culture that has surfaced around using Chaturbate to assist in unpaid, private, 1-on-1 sex.
Assisted by two performers that she interviewed, she “multiperved” or “audio-Skyped with each other while sifting through videos online” (p. 124). Collectively, logged on to browse the countless webpages of men loading but being watched by no-one. She represents (pp. 124-5):
not typically the most popular men, instead clicking through to the second and third webpages for the real amateurs, the forest of men in desk chair… It proved that they waited there for a reason… in order that they will find somebody who will cam-to-cam with them…
Witt (and her manuals) come across a man she discovers somewhat attractive, and she chats with him. The man quickly invites her to carefully turn her cam on. She obliges and sets up a password-protected room so only he can see her. While Witt will not seem to get the encounter particularly satisfying, she (p. 125) does offer some insight into the value others find in the knowledge:
here, where hopes resided in the opportunity of an electric encounter between two people, tokens mattered much less. If, on its squeeze page, Chaturbate was a large number of men viewing a few women, a few pages in, the amounts changed to 1 or two people using Chaturbate to communicate privately with someone else.
Witt’s experience highlights a really interesting case of technology being used against the grain. It is a rougish activity for users to seek non-transactional romantic or intimate encounters on sites whose profits come from viewers purchasing tokens. While these sites afford such activity , nor prohibit it, they don’t plan or explicitly condone it either. It is, perhaps, due to this absence control that sites enjoys Chaturbate remind Witt of the sooner Web.
While Witt’s study of the margins of camming sites is revealing, she also, probably, fails to signify most of the proceedings these sites and it is even somewhat dismissive of the more popular performers. Because she focuses on her desires as a thirty-something NYC article writer, Witt sometimes displays a hipster bias, where, if something isn’t weird or edgy, it’s not seen as deserving attention.
Witt is also not really a joiner. Her desire to experiment as part her own quest for sexual self-realization, drives her visit many places; but, generally, Witt will identify or feel a sense of owed with the people she meets. She appears to participate only far away, observing others as subjects as much as associations. Witt (p. 172) explains her own relationship to a sex party she attends, saying “I was still thinking about myself as just a visitor, or rather neither here nor there, someone executing an abstract inquiry but not yet with true intention.” This distancing is valuable insofar as it brings with it a degree of objectivity (almost every other things written about Orgasmic Mediation, for example, sound like marketing copy); however, it does mean she’s unable to offer an insider perspective through her personal narratives.
What’s lacking in the section on camming—credited to some combination of her hipster bias and lack of personal experience—is an examination of the many measurements of creative labor that goes into producing night time the most normative-appearing shows. Had Witt tried modeling herself, this would be readily apparent. The seeming ease with which models embody normative desires is part of the work—area of the performance of authenticity.
A most troubling second is when she uncritically relays one of her interviewee’s characterization of the very best performers as “zombie hot girls” (p. 124). This privileging of the odd in porn feeds some sort of whorearchy, where certain forms of sex work/practice are denigrated as a way of validating others.
Witt certainly is not consciously anti-sex work. In the previous chapter, in fact, she offers significant amounts of praise for the artistry women porn directors and companies, and she spends a substantial time questioning her own beliefs formed by mainstream feminism and considering more inclusive feminisms that embrace sex employees and porn as a medium. And, quite insightfully, she argues that much fetish porn is a reaction or response to new taboos setup by anti-porn feminists.
Nevertheless, Witt will not seem to extend the eye and regard she has for women-directed studio room porn to the women-directed shows of popular cam models. I’m certain they have unique insights and amazing stories to tell.
Regardless of these few criticisms, Witt gets one key thing right: The continuing future of sex can’t be reduced to a tale of technological development but must be recognized in terms of changing patterns of human being interactions. She (p. 210) concludes “America had a great deal of respect for future years of items, and less interest in the future of human preparations.” Because of this only, Future Sex probably deserves more attention.
